IBM Invests $100 Million in Health Care IT

By Brian T. Horowitz |
Posted 2010-07-16

IBM is investing $100 million over the next three years to
boost its efforts in medical research. The company will hire medical doctors,
nurses, clinicians, social scientists and engineers to work alongside more than
100 of its IT researchers, IBM announced July 15.

The
IT giant is active in areas such as DNA sequencing and nanomedicine, which
applies nanotechnology - the
building of materials at a subatomic level - to medicine.

With
the additional resources, medical professionals will be able to form a complete
picture of a patient's condition, improve medical outcomes and lower the cost
of care, Chalapathy Neti, global lead for health care transformation at IBM
Research, told eWEEK.

IBM
had been working with physicians at facilities such as Mayo Clinic and Memorial
Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Now by hiring doctors in-house, the company's
researchers will gain a better understanding of diagnosis and care without a
pause in workflow, Neti said. The newly hired physicians will help IBM build
medical technologies that can be easily adopted by the public, said Neti.

As
part of this initiative, IBM also announced its collaboration with the European
Hypergenes consortium
to study genomic, clinical and environmental factors that may cause essential
hypertension (EH).

The joint effort could lead to early detection, prevention
and therapy for EH patients, IBM said. Another project involves using data
mining and analytics to better understand the cause of drug reactions.

The
$100 million health care push includes a partnership with Peking University
People's Hospital in China to build a mobile platform to remotely manage
chronic diseases.

Meanwhile,
IBM also announced that it will share its expertise in analyzing IT systems
with claims processing firm NASCO (National Account Service Company) to help
the claims payment industry adapt to changing health-care regulations.

On
July 1, Big Blue announced a collaboration with Switzerland-based
pharmaceutical firm Roche on DNA sequencing that could lead to personalized medical
diagnosis and treatment.